He looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy.

But while Karshish has the true scholar's dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist.

He gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,--his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys.

The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy.

He is a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess.